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Hybridity of Cultural Nationalism in Korean Popular Music

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Hybridity of Cultural Nationalism in Korean Popular Music 대중음악 일반논문 Hybridity of Cultural Nationalism in Korean Popular Music: From Saeui Chanmi to Jeongtong Hip-hop*12) Pil Ho Kim(the Ohio State University) 1. Introduction 2. Nationalism and popular culture 3. Korean Popular Music in the Colonial Period: Between Japanese and American Influence 4. Military Camps and College Campuses: Rock, Propaganda, and Protest Songs in the 1970s 5. Korean Hip-hop: Nativism versus Globalism in Popular Music 6. Conclusion: Nationalism(s) in Korean Popular Music This paper focuses on three instances of Korean popular music history – colonial popular songs in the 1920-30s, the “youth culture” of rock and folk music in the 1960-70s, and Korean hip-hop since the 1990s – in which the meaning of nation and national culture came forward and was hotly contested. Nationalism as a political ideology finds its cultural expression in popular music, but at the same time nationalist ideology can be transformed by the global nature of the music. Specifically, the hybridization of traditional, Japanese and * This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea Grant funded by the Korean Government(NRF-2007-361-AM0005). Hybridity of Cultural Nationalism in Korean Popular Music_ Pil Ho Kim 219 Western musical forms in colonial pop songs, the repression of rock and folk by the authoritarian national culture doctrine, and the question of language and nationality in hop-hop are all illustrative of the hybridity of cultural nationalism in Korean popular music. Key words: cultural nationalism, hybridity, rock, folk, hip-hop 1. Introduction The history of Korean popular music exhibits a tangled array of polit- ical, social, and cultural threads. Since its inception during the colonial period, Korean popular music has been closely intertwined with nation- alist ideology in both form and substance. From the very beginning, Korean pop was a hybrid of traditional Korean and foreign musical ele- ments of both Eastern and Western origin, including Japanese ryūkōka and American Jazz. In such a hybrid form, musicians and audiences have found their ways to express a Korean cultural identity. The tension between the global and the national in popular music, however, ended up with destructive collisions in a highly contentious atmosphere of au- thoritarian South Korea during the 1960-70s. As opposed to government propaganda songs espousing militarist na- tionalism, American-influenced rock and protest folk music, represented by Shin Joong Hyun(Sin Jung-hyeon) and Kim Min-gi respectively, sought for a fundamentally different vision of the Korean nation. Be they col- 220 대중음악 통권 18호(2016년 하반기) lege rock bands and protest song activists in the 1970-80s, or the pop superstar Seo Taiji(Seo Taeji) in the 1990s, all strove to define originality as well as national identity in their imported pop styles. The hip-hop artists of today are facing the same kind of question, while at the same time the pace of globalization casts a doubt on the old conception of nation and national culture based on ethnic homogeneity. These were the times when the Korean musicians attempted to navi- gate through the globally induced musical transformations and the na- tionally contested political/ideological changes, which tend to highlight the issue of cultural nationalism. By focusing on the three instances de- scribed above, this paper attempts to construct a nuanced yet critical view on how cultural nationalism is established in relation to the global- izing cultural hegemony. 2. Nationalism and popular culture Nationalism is a notoriously difficult concept to apply across civil- izations. For many western historians and social scientists, nationalism refers to a political ideology tied to the rise of the nation-state in European history(Gellner, 1983; Anderson, 1983; Hobsbawm, 1990). This theory, known as civic nationalism, becomes less convincing when it comes to East Asia since “the most important states of East Asia… were national states long before any of their European counterparts”(Arrighi, 2008). The long presence of stable national states with distinct linguis- Hybridity of Cultural Nationalism in Korean Popular Music_ Pil Ho Kim 221 tic, ethnic, and cultural characteristics also contributed to the fact that “ethnic nationalism” is the prevailing notion of nationalism in many of these countries, which equates national identity with predominant ethnicity(Connor, 1994; Smith, 1995). The social foundation for nationhood might have existed for a long time in the East, yet nationalism as a political ideology was clearly a modern import from the West. The ideological split between capitalist right and socialist left in the colonized world lasted throughout national liberation struggles, resulting in post-colonial regimes on both sides of the Cold War. Korea is probably the most dramatic example of two opposed visions of modern nationhood fighting over one nation(Shin and Robinson, 1999; Shin, Gi-wook, 2006). Popularization of nationalism is never an automatic process; it in- volves a great deal of efforts on the part of the state and/or the modern elite vying for political power. The “invention of tradition” ― the crea- tion of the myth of a nation that embodies immortality and ultimate virtues ― is an important part of the process for this reason(Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1992). It would be a mistake, however, to think that “people” are relegated to a passive audience in the mythical theater of nation-state. For nationalism to work at the ideological level, it should be more of a “lived relation”(Althusser, 1969: 233) or “lived experi- ence”(Eagleton, 1991: 148∼150) of all the members of a given nation rather than just a useful fiction of the manipulative elite. People do actively participate in the rituals, create their own narratives, and ex- press their sentiments and ideas about the nation as an imagined com- 222 대중음악 통권 18호(2016년 하반기) munity, which may or may not follow the script of the ruling elite. Therefore, popular culture in various forms ― music, literature, theater, film, dance, painting, cartoon, etc. ― is often much more instructive than the official doctrines of the nation-state or nationalist movement in revealing how a nation is constructed from the bottom up― in other words, from the lived experiences of ordinary people. Unlike traditional folk culture, popular culture under capitalism has been increasingly commodified, mass produced, and globalized. Just as the ideology and institutions of nationalism and the nation-state were imported from the west, so were many models, forms, media, and tech- nologies of modern popular culture ― most notably film, recording and broadcasting industries. From the beginning, the mass-mediated popular culture of East Asia has become a “global mélange” in nature(Pieterse, 2003). This globalizing tendency has been countered and tempered by what can be dubbed as cultural nationalism ― a set of ideological doc- trines and practices that aim to preserve the cultural identity of the nation while selectively appropriating inroads of global cultural flows. The push and pull of global-national dynamics makes popular culture sometimes a highly politicized area of contention. It is not surprising that Korean popular music is full of such contentions between global influence and cultural nationalism, considering Korea’s checkered his- tory of foreign occupation, nationalist mobilization, and political use of music in the modern era. Hybridity of Cultural Nationalism in Korean Popular Music_ Pil Ho Kim 223 3. Korean Popular Music in the Colonial Period: Between Japanese and American Influence There are many ways to define what popular music is(Middleton, 1990; Negus, 1996; Shuker, 1998). Broadly speaking, it is considered a modern form of musical culture with technological ― recording and broad- casting ― as well as commercial underpinnings. In that sense, it was the influx of western music and recording business in the colonial era that set the stage for Korean popular music. Eu-Jeong Zhang(2005: 7) specifically points to the introduction of the phonograph as the point of departure from what she calls “proto-popular musical forms” of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, such as pansori(oral narrative poetry) and japga(light songs).1) The first popular music hit song was “Saeui Chanmi(The Praise of Death)”(Various Artists, 2003[1926]), an adaptation of Iosif Ivanovich’s waltz, “Danube Waves”. While the lyrics were written in Korean, the song was recorded and released first in Japan. The singer, Yun Sim-deok, who had received classical music education in Japan, was the best-known Korean soprano at the time. A premier Korean modern girl (moga), Yun inspired many young men and women with her west- ern-style “high life.” The tragic “double suicide” she committed with her illicit lover ― they are said to have jumped off the ship into the waters of the Korean Strait ― a year after the song’s release only in- 1) English translations of pansori and japga are taken from Kim(1997). 224 대중음악 통권 18호(2016년 하반기) creased her mystique(Yi and Lee, 2006). The cultural significance of “Saeui Chanmi” goes beyond this scandal- ous affair. The same conditions and processes that produced Korean popular music were at work in shaping the nationalist ideology ― a western invention, imported through Japan, adopted by Koreans. The 1920s witnessed a strategic shift in Japanese colonial rule. As a response to the March First mass uprisings in 1919, the colonial authorities switched to the so-called cultural policy(bunka seiji) that allowed news- papers, magazines and other mass media institutions to be owned or operated by Koreans. The upshot of this policy change was a mush- rooming of Korean-owned publications and the rise of “cultural nation- alism” led by moderate intellectuals as well as business, religious and political leaders. Korean popular music was born in this atmosphere of cultural renaissance. Colonial popular music had prospered throughout the 1930s before Japan’s war mobilization drive shut it down at the beginning of the following decade.
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